Wild Ponies

Although they’re based in Nashville, Wild Ponies have always looked to Southwest Virginia — where bandmates Doug and Telisha Williams were both born and raised — for inspiration. There, in mountain towns like Galax, old-time American music continues to thrive, supported by a community of fiddlers, flat-pickers, and fans. Doug first learned to play music from the elders of his family, hailing from musically-rich Galax, 77 miles west of Martinsville on Route 58. The Galax Old Fiddler’s Convention played a prominent role in Doug’s upbringing; he first appeared onstage in a banjo contest at age five.

Besides being fine old-time musicians, Doug’s family wrote many songs, and Doug has emerged as one of the region’s finest songwriters. Telisha learned to sing from her uncle Sammy, who sang with his brothers in a gospel quartet called the Believers. Together, Doug and Telisha write and perform country, honky-tonk, and Americana music that draws from their experiences growing up in Martinsville and life on the road. They put their own indelible stamp on their music, which is steeped in tradition but infused with vitality, moxie, creativity, and soul. Doug and Telisha recently returned to Doug’s grandfather’s farm in Galax, bringing along Nashville musical friends Fats Kaplin, Will Kimbrough, Neilson Hubbard, and Audrey Spillman, to record in the farm’s vacant shed with some local old-time players including Snake and Kyle Dean Smith, and fiddler Kilby Spencer of the Crooked Road Ramblers. The music was recorded live with a mobile recording unit, with little rehearsal, and without overdubs or other forms of studio trickery. The result is their new album Galax, a hauntingly beautiful recording.

“We’ll always be the pinball that bounces between folk, rock & roll and country,”

says Telisha,

“and this Old-Time style will always weave its way through everything we do. It’s been there from the start, even on the loudest songs we’ve made.”